A Case Study on the Communication and Computation Behaviors of Real Applications in NoC-Based MPSoCs

Network-on-chip (NoC) based multiprocessor system-on-chips (MPSoCs) have been proposed as promising architectures to meet modern applications' ever-increasing demands for computing capability under limited power budget. Understanding the behaviors of MPSoC applications is the key to design MPSoCs under tight power and performance constraints. In this case study, we systematically examine the computation and communication behaviors of four real applications on MPSoCs based on three popular NoC topologies. We formally model real multiprocessor applications as task communication graphs (TCG) to accurately capture their computation and communication requirements. We publicly release a multiprocessor benchmark suite called COSMIC online, which includes the TCG models. In this work, we analyze the spatial distributions of workloads and traffics for each application, and evaluate their performance and energy efficiency on various MPSoC architectures. Our study shows that fat tree based MPSoCs are good choices for applications requiring high network throughput.